A blog about my profession, flexible education, and about Internet, the social web, and anything else that catches my eye.

Friday, March 30, 2007

Interesting Friday!

I've just been sitting in our department meeting - how nice to hear from different sections within the department and to feel that we really we are going somewhere.

The Web2.0 discussion we had yesterday with our boss seems to have resonated with other discussions he has had with other people. Our idea for a interest-group didn't come up directly but the organisation is interesting in deepening the level of knowledge we have.

R.E and I had thought a such group could look at web2.0 in different ways. First would be a technical look at how the different tools work and how easy they were to use. Secondly would be a pedagogical discussion - how can they be used and how are people using them in a learning and/or collaborative situation. Are they best used for e-learning (very individual) or for collaborative learning, democratic discourse and so on. Perhaps the TOOLS can be used for both and the distinction depends upon the users, rather than the tools.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. A CFL group, a private group, or perhaps a mixture of the two. There is also the prospect of a link up with Miun.

Btw today I was reading a teaching blog about cyber bullying and then found a further link to "Stop Cyberbullying Day" There are negative sides to web2.0 as well as positive ones. It's up us to see that the positive outweighs the negative!

And finally the Al Gore film "An Inconvenient Truth". Thanks for showing us this film! (Excellent pedagogics, quite apart from the content.)